It’s been some time that I have been thinking to create a “graphical” way to see how a given track gets its inspiration from.

To explain myself a little a bit more, I’ll try to translate (from french) this great quote from John Hassell in the book Modulations: A History of Electronic Music:

“I think it would be interesting to make a recording where all the samples would be identified and classified, like an archeologist would do. That way, we would have a graph with a color code which would tell us that this bass drum with a particular reverb, comes from a particular studio in 1963. I think it would be a revelation for people who thinks sampling is just putting your voice over large extracts of others people music. They would realize that music has becoming a big collage”

The vision he had is somehow, I think, possible to realize with the actual technology we have acquired.

I’ve been thinking about that since some years now and I think I have some beginning of a solution.

You know what QR codes are ? Well, I think a similar process can be applied to do a form of sound archeaology. The thing to look out is how many dimension are we talking about. It’s maybe hard to understand (more precisions coming), but let’s say you have a given sound. You know it has been recorded at a particular time (1 dimension), at a particular location (1 dimension?), using a particular process (another dimension). If we draw an analogy with QR codes, you can have a same description using those mutliple dimensions (that means a 3D QR Code). Now, if we take this qr code and make it evolve through time, we can have a kind of evolving qr code with all the embeded informations of a given composition (organized sound).

Maybe a drawing would be better to understand that, and I’ll include that later.

This is still very abstract, so maybe hard to get. But I think the main idea is here, even if it can sounds a little bit crayzeh 😀

“Many videos on youtube are not accessible for german users. Major record labels and the GEMA do not have an agreement with youtube because of financial differences. A situation which is bothering musicfans all over the country. That’s why we made up this humorous but functional little idea.”

The following record labels and institutions will be blocked when visiting your website or blog:

Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony, GEMA, Universal Music

How To:

Copy the following line into the sourcecode of your website or blog:<script type="text/javascript" src="http://bustallmajors.com/doit"></script>

We can draw an analogy between birds (and their organisation) and how political parties operates.

Let’s take a group of birds sitting on a nice tree, which would represent a given political group.
Those birds seems to operate in a random fashion, for the untrained eye… But in fact there is an order, a hierarchy. Like in a political party.

If one observe a group of birds, they’ll notice there are some leaders (maybe 2 to 5 birds) and a bunch of followers.

For birds, the leaders would seek a better tree for the group, or for themselves. They can be followed by the birds on the old tree or they can end up being all alone on the new one.

Sometimes, feeling all alone on a given tree, those leaders would come back to the previous tree, because they failed to create something new.

The analogy with politics is pretty obvious: There are also leaders and followers. Leaders would seek to be popular on their own political group and if not, if the group fails, they can either quit politics or create a new group.

If the political leader fails in creating a new group, they may return to their previous love… But that can be seen odd for their old partners.

And that’s maybe the main difference between birds (or Animals in general) and humans: the ability to ask this simple question: Why ?

We have the chance, as an evolved species, to have a good amount of free will (at least we think we have) and we are not ruled by our Uncounscious like most Animals. But always remember, we have evolved FROM those cute creatures 🙂

“Eventually it was discovered, that God did not want us to be all the same. This was Bad News for the Governments of The World, as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings. Mankind must be made more uniformly if The Future was going to work. Various ways were sought to bind us all together, but, alas, same-ness was unenforceable. It was about this time, that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization. Based on the principle, that if we were all crooks, we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law. […] Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular except with those people, who didn’t want to be crooks or outlaws, so, of course, they had to be Tricked Into It… which is one of the reasons, why music was eventually made Illegal.”
– Joe’s Garage Acts II & III liner notes, 1979.

4 A.M: Time to talk about a mysterious idea about a mysterious concept: anti-money.
So you may be asking yourself, what the hell is anti-money ?

Well, it’s a kind of concept I created to represent a force coming against the financial system, against the common experience: I sell for x€, wanna buy ? Yeah, here’s your x€. kthxbai.

But, is there another way, the other way around ?
Yes, of course and they already exist: donations (for goods), sharing, collaboration… represent an exchange where no money is involved in the process.

So, if we, people, are complaining about the evil powers of money ruling our lives, we must first consider giving these options (sharing) more credit and weight on the political balance. Our dear politicians needs to realize that and soon or the Masses will revolt, and the system will implode.
People are already getting on the streets (occupy wall-street, Europe protestations against austerity politics) but people must realize, individually, the importance of this counter or anti-money. They have to think about it themselves, make their own opinion and decide if sharing, collaboration, openess are needed in our society more than closeness, patents, copyrights, hierarchy and orders.

If everyone starts to think about it a little, the solution seems pretty clear. Support file sharing, make a copy. Only by that act, making a copy (of everything you want wether copyrighted or not) is a militant act to protest against the closeness of copyrights and patents. Share everything you can and we will make the life of MAFIAA* pretty shitty. And please, make it so I could download a car, in a coming future.

Think about what that would imply…

Most of you already know the issues concerning file sharing and (?) piracy (bunch of guys stealin stuff on the high seas, preferably before XXth century). That is, the devaluation of the digital file over its physical copy. Making a copy makes the file miserable in terms of value, pricing.

What would be the price of something you can copy till infinity ?

Supply and demand: supply is infinite, demand can be very big… that’s utopia ! Imagine that it could be applied for physical goods. Of wait, that’s already possible ! 3D printers have been made possible through technological progress and science. It’s an overall progress for society, too.

So, will the 3D printer be closed, patented like all other aspects of intellectual property on this Earth ?

I don’t think so, and that’s why the 3D printer opens a void for this concept of anti-money. 3D printers are already able to print anything you want that’s not too big or from alien materials, and they can print very complicated shapes and patterns. You can build one at home using open source instructions and also get the files from…. thepiratebay.org (MAFIAA* target), because these clever dudes saw the trend coming and decided to create a section to share bluerpint files for the printer. All of that with reduced costs if you compare with buying everything you print vs building the printer and buying the materials.

This is where the physical world starts to overlap more and more with our digital world, the Internet. And when you connect the 2 dots, you have awesomeness. And you have also the death of the idea of intellectual property, copyrights, patents and all that shit that is getting our world so closed. Make the world open, make a copy. Sharing is caring.

I had this idea (and I think I unconsciously heard it somwhere), that if one wants to create a good work of Art, he shouldn’t be able to take one thing away from the original material. That means it goes against a common idea of adding and adding until it’s finished (you can’t add more). It’s the wrong way I believe. Because we know how beauty and aesthetics are related to the principles of simplicity and harmony (symmetry/balance).
That’s why I find the Yin-Ynag symbol very beautiful, and it’s very “Minimal” in a way… It convey the idea of 2 opposite forces that makes balance happen. It’s, for me, the greatest symbol for the duality in Nature.
Apple, the computer company not the fruit, has largely based its philosophy on that principle and it worked (with awful loads of clever marketing).
So, we musician should always keep in mind that principle, that even the most complex things can be explained with simple rules (think of E=mc², Maxwell equations… are all fundamental and aesthetically pleasent).
Aesthetics, which are at the basis of any work of Art, represent the search for beauty, which itself represent the fact that less is more, somehow.